Key Points
- SA will establish a Voice to Parliament within months, following Victoria on the Uluru Statement's agenda.
- Acting Premier Kyam Maher says the commitment pre-dates the failed 2023 referendum and stands apart from it.
South Australia will establish an Indigenous Voice to Parliament over coming months, Acting Premier Kyam Maher has said, cementing the state as the second-most advanced jurisdiction on the Uluru Statement's unfinished agenda.
Speaking to NITV's John-Paul Janke and Natalie Ahmat on the broadcaster's Garma set against a backdrop of stringybarks rising from the red Arnhem Land dirt, Maher said the government would spend $8.5 million on a commission that will run a truth-telling process and advise on a possible treaty for the state.
Maher is also South Australia's Aboriginal Affairs Minister.
The commission is the next stage in a program the state's Labor party has pursued since 2019. Responding to the Uluru Statement from the Heart — the 2017 declaration by Indigenous leaders calling for a Voice to Parliament, treaty and truth-telling — was its first policy commitment that year.
The Voice to Parliament has since met with a major setback. In October 2023, just over 60 per cent of Australians rejected a constitutional referendum to recognise Indigenous people and establish a federal advisory Voice to Parliament, with every state and territory except the ACT voting No.
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After Queensland, South Australia recorded the country's highest No vote.
A promise predating the No vote
South Australia, though, had already legislated its own Voice before the referendum. Maher rejected the argument the No result should halt the state's other measures.
"This is about something we committed seven years ago to do in South Australia, and we will take that commitment," he told NITV on Sunday, referencing the 2019 pledge Labor made in opposition and carried into government in 2022.
"What was voted on at the referendum was to change the federal constitution, to firstly recognise Aboriginal people — recognise the oldest living culture this planet's ever seen — but also to establish an advisory body."
He acknowledged not everyone was behind him. "I wouldn't say there's no division," Maher said, adding that the issue still generates dozens of letters to his office each month.
The state's Voice has now been through two elections. The body — elected by and from First Nations South Australians — will advise parliament, cabinet and government agencies on health, education, the criminal justice system and other matters affecting their communities.
Maher said the first part of the state's efforts was spent building the machinery of a body. Without a national precedent, he likened the work to "building the plane as you're flying it".
"[You're] having to put that infrastructure around something that had never happened in Australia before," he said.
At the second election, about half the incumbents were returned and half the seats went to new members, a mix he said was beginning to produce substantive advice for the government to act on.
On Saturday, Voice architect Noel Pearson, in his first major speech since the referendum, told Garma the defeat had left him carrying new hopes that have turned out to be a "mirage". This reflected how heavily the loss in 2023 still hung over national debate.
The map beyond Canberra
South Australia's trajectory places it just behind Victoria, which in May commenced Australia's first treaty under its Statewide Treaty Act.
The law makes Victoria's First Peoples' Assembly a permanent body, known as Gellung Warl. It is a new truth-telling institution that builds on the earlier Yoorrook Justice Commission.
Other states have not been able to replicate South Australia and Victoria's successes.
Queensland repealed its Path to Treaty laws in late 2024, shutting down a truth-telling inquiry barely five months into its work and abolishing the body set up to negotiate treaty.
The Northern Territory's Country Liberal government scrapped its long-running treaty process in early 2025.
New South Wales is midway through a 12-month consultation on whether Aboriginal communities want a treaty at all, while Western Australia has pursued truth-telling and redress rather than a treaty.
The Australian Electoral Commission's decision in July to rename the federal seat of Grey as the Division of O'Donoghue drew Maher's welcome. On Sunday, the Acting Premier said it honoured a South Australian in the late Yankunytjatjara leader Lowitja O'Donoghue.
The electorate takes in much of the Anangu Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara Lands.
Maher, who knew O'Donoghue, called the change "exceptionally significant". It also points to a history in which "Aboriginal people have been deliberately excluded".
The unveiling in June of a bronze statue of O'Donoghue at Tarntanya Wama (Elder Park) in Adelaide — the first of six planned to honour prominent Aboriginal South Australians — is part of the same effort to correct that record.
NITV and SBS will have extensive coverage from the Garma Festival beginning Friday 31 July and concluding Monday 3 August. You can watch on SBS and NITV and SBS On Demand.
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